Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Markus Hitter]

Am 21.12.2013 15:11, schrieb Ivan Vučica:
>> If you integrate GNUstep into existing distros, including Windows 
>> and Mac OS X, you compete just on the application level. And the 
>> chance for e.g. GNUmail to become as popular as Thunderbird are 
>> many orders of magnitude higher.
> 
> Isn't providing Debian packages + remastering Debian or Ubuntu one
> of the ways to go about integrating?

Yes.

> And note that this is the strategy that has not played well for 
> GNUstep so far;

I could understand this observation if GNUmail were actually integrated.
But it isn't. If you install GNUmail from Debian packages you get
something very old and buggy, if you install from Phillipes packages,
you get something ignoring and trying to replace Unity and something
compiled for older releases.

Actually I'm tempted to fix this situation by providing current packages
via a PPA and eventually forwarding these to Debian, but I also can't
get rid of the impression here is no interest in the results. Manually
built packages are undoubtly a honorable effort, but why the heck are
they built for no less than four older Ubuntu releases, but not the
current one? Why is there no interest in showing up with them in Ubuntus
software center? Why do I get answers along "oh, NeXTstep is so modern"
if I point out incompatibilities with current user expectations? Why do
most people here expect users to compile software from tarballs? Outside
of GNUstep people are used to use appstores (which Ubuntu provides).

I maintain three open source projects already as a one man show, so I'm
not exactly keen on adding a fourth one. :-)

Sorry if this sounds like ranting, I just try to describe the
differences between what I see here and what I see elsewhere.

> Is there a single package that'll give me a login session ...

"login session"? Uhm, how does this matter? I see a login session only
if an application managed to let X11 die. Perhaps I should mention I use
a PC not for watching window manager artwork, but for productivity. This
means, stability, stability, stability for all the 20+ applications I
use regularly. That's also why I run Ubuntu: a minimum of distraction by
technical fuzz and very stable.


Markus

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